290 YOU CAN'T BE TOO OAREFUL

unfortunate Henry. She wasn't going to have a thing made
after the fashion of Edward Albert thrust upon her. She
resisted every momentary impulse to regard Henry as more
than a premature and misbegotten little cuckoo. On the
other hand, she elevated Mr Grigson to the highest honours
among possible sires. She almost believed the glowing
imaginations she wrapped about him. Millie Chaser had
to listen at times to revelations about that quiet-seeming, civil-
spoken gentleman that threw a languid pallor over the
dalliance of Psyche with Cupid. At any rate, the children
were healthy, active and good-looking, and Evangeline made,
as people say, a remarkably good mother. She had a quick
eye for temperatures, symptoms and slackening appetites.
Her fourth offspring, the second son, was born a few weeks ago.

She reads the newspapers and she may even go tearing her
way through a book that arouses her curiosity. Through
her unquestionably magnifying eyes she sees the ever-increas-
ing disaster of the world in terrifying proportions. She is
persistent in her struggle to realise some more satisfactory way
of securing a good life for her offspring than that confusion
promises, she talks to her husband, she worries all the brains
she has, and it may be she will wrench something worth while
out of it all. She may get the idea of Eutrophy, and that is a
good idea. She may grasp the fact that the fate of every child
and the fate of the world are inseparable, so that no child on
earth now has much of an outlook unless there is a world
revolution. Harsh, clamorous and vain though she is'at
times, the world revolution may yet get a profit out of her
energy. She is less of a resultant and more of a will than
anyone else in this story.

So much for Evangeline. Mrs Humbelay, I regret to
lay, for I have an irrational affection for her, died very
suddenly of fatty degeneration of the heart, during a London
air raid in 1940. She was saying," It doesn't stand to reason,"
and then she and her voice faded out altogether amidst the
uproar. But then her voice always fydcd out* They did not
realise she was dead until they perceived that her lips moved
no longer.